[TUHS] Re: What would early alternatives to C have been?

ESPOL was basically first, with BCPL, PL/360, and, as George mentioned, BLISS showing up soon thereafter. On Sat, Mar 8, 2025 at 10:47 PM Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote: Any 360 shop, particularly if it was targeted for teaching students, would likely have had Wirth's compiler. Remember, as BCPL was to CPL, PL/360 was to Algol-W. Unlike BCPL, I don't know of any port of PL/360 outside of the IBM world. Algol-W would later be implemented in C, but that was later after Wirth tried again with Pascal. Only Ken can answer that. My guess is that Algol-W would have failed for the same reasons Pascal ultimately failed. It really was directed at students and lacked many of the tools C had. Many of the issues exposed in Brian's treatise *"Why is Pascal not my favorite programming language"* also apply to Algol-W. At the time, BLISS had the advantage of the first "Green Book" style optimizer, so in comparison to the original B and later C compilers, their code generators were almost toys. I believe that the killer for BLISS was DEC's choice to charge $5K per/cpu and to few places were willing to pay it. But as Paul points out BLISS was word-oriented, which, from a technical point of view, made it more difficult to use than C. ᐧ